Jewish Geography

You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler, he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!”

The Ottoman sultan Bayezid II is said to have made this disparaging remark about Spain’s Catholic king upon the latter’s expulsion of Jews and Muslims in 1492. Knowing what an asset the Jewish community of al-Andalus had been to the Arab kingdoms there, the sultan was astonished at Ferdinand’s edict and welcomed the Jewish refugees from his Christian foe.

Jewish history has been defined in large part by expulsions, and the search for places that accept them. In the past this included Muslim rulers. In 1940, Mohammed V of Morocco famously refused to implement the antisemitic edicts of the French Vichy regime allied with Nazi Germany. Considering himself Amir al-Mu’minin (Commander of the Faithful) like his namesake the prophet, Mohammed V saw the Jews not as the wandering people as portrayed in Christian legend, but as People of the Book deserving of protection. “There are no Jews in Morocco. There are only Moroccan subjects.”

 His firm act of defiance — understood by scholars today to have been on political as well as religious grounds — in support of his country’s quarter of a million Jews stood in starkly heroic contrast to the impotence and inaction (at best) of Pope Pius XII, later nicknamed “Hitler’s Pope” for his secret back channels of communication with the Nazi regime.

Sadly, more recent history has been one of ever fewer safe places for Jews. The Middle East, once a haven, has become largely Jewless (Israel excepted).

Through a mixture of expulsions, voluntary and semi-voluntary emigrations, and everything in between, the Jewish population of Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East has gone from a million in 1948 to an estimated 15,000 today. (Israel currently has approximately 1.7 million Muslim citizens.)

The recent history of Christians in Muslim-majority countries hasn’t been much better. The Christian population of the Middle East has declined precipitously in the past 100 years as well. In 1910, Christians made up 13.6 percent of the population. Today they constitute between 3 and 5 percent. Europe itself is becoming less and less Christian over time — 95 percent in 1900, projected to be 65 percent by 2050 — and more Muslim. Africa, on the other hand, is expected to be home to 40 percent of the world’s Christians by the year 2060. All these changes in the monotheistic world suggest that, as at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, Jewish demography is undergoing enormous changes.

What distinguishes the Jews from other monotheistic faiths in this massive transformation is that while the Christian and Muslim worlds are becoming geographically more diverse, the once wildly diverse Jewish Diaspora has become dramatically less so. Jewish migration in recent decades has been almost entirely to Israel and the United States, such that 90 percent of world Jewry today are American or Israeli citizens, some both. Over 70 percent of the Jewish Diaspora resides in North America, the vast majority in the United States.

But what’s different about the United States, unique among English-speaking countries, is that it is the only country with a sizable Jewish population, besides Israel, where Jews outnumber Muslims. The U.S. has twice as many Jewish citizens as Muslim citizens.

To cite a few well-known counterexamples, France, the country with the largest Jewish population in Europe, and the third-largest in the world, has a Jewish population below 500,000 and a Muslim population of over 5 million. The United Kingdom, where approximately 250,000 Jews live, is home to 4.9 million Muslims. Even Canada’s relatively small Muslim community of 1.8 million dwarfs its Jewish community of fewer than 400,000, the fourth-largest Jewish community in the world.

Another critical change is the growing cooperation between Jews and Christians. Israel is today the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population is rising, and the youth of that population has the strongest high-school graduation rates of any group in Israel, including Jews.

A similar trend is developing in the United States as well, as more Jews move to regions of the American South that exhibit high levels of Christian affiliation. Jews have been heading to Miami for decades, but today Florida’s Jewish population, barely 100,000 in 1960, stands at more than 670,000. The Jewish community in Houston grew 50 percent between 1986 and 2016, and 1,800 Jews move to the Dallas area every year. There were 9,000 Jews in Atlanta at the end of the Second World War, 60,000 in 1984, and nearly 100,000 today. In 1930, 60 percent of American Jews lived in the Northeast, compared with today’s 40 percent. The percentage of Jews living in the South has grown from 9 percent in 1960 to 22 percent today.

So, the Jewish part of the current migration story is that Jews are migrating away from regions where Islam is a prime religious force (the Middle East and Europe) and to areas where Christianity is dominant (the American South).

This geographic sea change can be seen on college campuses as well. The first- and third-largest Jewish student populations in the United States today are at the University of Florida and Central Florida University. According to a Brandeis study ranking the level of hostility toward Jewish students,

Concurrent with Jewish moves to the largely Protestant South is the developent of a Christian constituency that every year increases in number and political power: Hispanic Americans.

Hispanics have had a substantial presence in the South for several generations. Because of high birth rates and migration from Mexico and Central America, Hispanics today are 40 percent of the Texas population, surpassing non-Hispanic whites as the largest demographic group. High immigration from Latin America, Puerto Rico, and other states has brought the percentage of Florida that is Hispanic to 27 percent. Approximately 85 percent of Hispanics are Christian, mostly Catholic, but with a growing minority of Protestant Evangelicals.

In the past, Jews have succeeded by allying with other immigrant (particularly Catholic) populations, as was plainly evident on the Lower East Side. When the Jews started arriving in large numbers at Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century, the Italians and the Irish had already been there for at least a generation. In recent books such as Opening Doors: The Unlikely Alliance Between the Irish and the Jews in America and Forged in America: How Irish-Jewish Encounters Shaped a Nation, scholars including Hasia R. Diner, Miriam Nyhan Grey, and Terry Golway explain how Irish Catholics, who had settled in New York a generation before, partnered with the erstwhile Ostjuden upon their arrival to revolutionize the great American city. Speaking of the Irish who had been laboring to establish themselves politically, Golway says, “They and their Jewish constituents were cultural outsiders in a city whose unelected power structure remained self-consciously Protestant, at a time when these religious distinctions carried with them markers not only of class but of true Americanism.”

Although there is of course already a deep Jewish history in the South that largely predates the story of the Lower East Side, the migration of Jews southward today can be seen as a second act of the Jewish-American migration drama. Whereas in the 1920s Jews were escaping Christian pogroms on one side of the world to build a great American city alongside Christians on the other, the 2020s are about Jewish migration from the secular and liberal Northeast to the religious and conservative Sun and Bible Belts.

Hispanic Americans today make for equal if not natural allies on that journey. Among the many cultural similarities between Hispanic- and Jewish-American culture — family, faith, and a demonstrated commitment to the American project — are their strong diasporic identities and their proactive and enduring ties to other countries: Latin and Central America for Hispanics, and Israel for Jews. The Irish also had this in common with their Jewish neighbors on Orchard Street, a commonality that fostered a sense of similarity of circumstance. And as Evangelicalism grows among Hispanic Christians, the affinity for Israel across Hispanic America is likely to grow as well. Like Jewish Americans, Hispanic Americans also exhibit a remarkable propensity for entrepreneurship in the United States, initiating more businesses per capita than any other racial or ethnic group, expanding over the past decade by 34 percent, compared with only 1 percent for all business owners. Many of these businesses in retail, manufacturing, and construction utilize Latino labor, which means their business are beneficial to the community as a whole. Many successful Jewish businesses in the United States began this way as well.

These commonalities present great opportunities for affinity between the Jewish and Hispanic communities of the American South, where Jews are becoming a political force alongside the already strong Hispanic electorate.

The convergence is as much a political as a geographic and economic one. Donald Trump’s claim on 40 percent of New York’s Jewish vote suggests that he did very well among Jews in red states such as Texas and Florida, where he made remarkable overall gains. He won well over 50 percent of the Hispanic vote in both states.

Jewish communities need to prioritize cultivating ties with the established Christian communities of the South, especially Hispanics, the political kingmakers of the near future.

To date, far too little attention has been paid to building these relationships, and the Jewish community has already lost ground. The city of Los Angeles and several others in California serve as cautionary tales of how susceptible migrant communities can be to antisemitic tropes. This was nakedly revealed in 2021 recordings of the LA City Council in which four Latino councilmembers, including City Council President Nury Martinez, “featured profane remarks and insults about Black people, Oaxacans, Jews, Armenians and others,” with specifically bitter characterizations of “judios” and their power in the City of Angels.

Just south of Los Angeles, in Santa Ana, a largely Latino community of 300,000 located in Orange County, Jews have been present for more than a century. Many became leading merchants in the city’s historic downtown and generally had friendly relations with the overall community, according to Dalia Taft, director of the Orange County Jewish Historical Society. But the failure of the Jewish community to build close and collaborative relationships has paved the way for the town’s increasingly antisemitic and anti-Israel politics. A proposed city council resolution that denounced Israel was barely defeated. The Jewish community has been playing a bit of catch-up with would-be Latino allies, notably Mayor Valerie Amezcua, who helped to fend off the resolution and later even attended Passover services at my own Santa Ana synagogue.

Latino politicians such as Amezcua and New York’s Ritchie Torres, of Puerto Rican Catholic heritage, identify deeply with the Jewish community and with the State of Israel. The growing Jewish communities of the South need to cultivate the same kinds of relationships in Texas, Florida, and elsewhere at the local and state level and make the case for Jewish concerns and priorities. Given the ambitions, values, and trajectories of the Hispanic communities of these states, there is much opportunity for working together.

And wouldn’t working together in Spanish be a historic rebuke of King Ferdinand?